Ncottone

Celebrity is an amazing cruise line and we had a blast. If you are a bit more of a drinker, I highly recommend paying the $55 + gratuities per day to pay for all-you-can-drink. Completely worth it for the amazing martini bar, wine with dinner, beers and bloody marys on the pool deck, etc. It's a really great deal considering the martini bar is roughly $10-$12 per martini. The staff is, of course, all friendly and amazing. We decided to do a short excursion in Jamaica to the Duns River Falls. We had a great tour guide and driver over to Ocho Rios but upon arrival at Duns River Falls, the wait was horrendous. There had to be about 1000 people there (I'm not exaggerating here). We waited in line for at least an hour in a crowd of people in the hot weather just to get a tour guide for the falls. One girl passed out literally right in front of me and an ambulance was called. The crowd was just too big and very disorganized. They aren't equipped to handle that many people at one time. The Duns River Falls is gorgeous and we enjoyed climbing it but again we were climbing it with hundreds of other people so it sort of takes the "nature" aspect out of it. Bring a water proof camera if you can. Otherwise the guides on the Falls take pictures and a video of your group and make you do weird cheers... if you're into that, cool. We weren't... And had no desire to pay $40 for a DVD of our climb with a bunch of other tourists in the video we don't know. Now if you are with a large group of people and you all go together, maybe it would be worth it. On to Grand Cayman. Gorgeous island and much more wealthy than Jamaica. We did the Island tour and beach day excursion. The Island Tour included a stop at what they called the "Rum Factory." The Rum factory turned out to be a 15 minute stop at a gift shop that sold rum cake and their native rum in various flavors. You can sample cake and rum and then buy it or other touristy junk. We were hoping to see them actually making the rum cake in a RUM FACTORY as they advertise. This tour also included a tour of what they call "Hell." Welcome to Hell signs are everywhere... a Devil pop-up, etc. It's of the funky rocks that were created somehow naturally and it looks of someone's version of what Hell would look like. Again, this is a tourist trap. 3-4 gift shops with t-shirts, stickers, hats, etc., with various sayings of "Welcome to Hell". We had 15 minutes to "tour" it. Not impressed. We did stop at this very wealthy metro area that had a gorgeous tower with the largest underwater scene made of small tiles. And the mall area had some fun stores but we really felt like we were in a city in the US. There were quite a few Americans and Canadians working in the stores there. It was a pretty area. Then we got to the beach. Beach and water is gorgeous of course! But they bring ALL the tourists to this same beach from ALL the cruise lines that are in port. It's majorly overloaded with other tourists and they are severely understaffed at the bars and the restaurant. Lunch was not included in our price of this excursion so we paid for our own lunch. It ended up being the equivalent of $50+ for our lunch. We had a cheeseburger, a panini sandwich, and two bottled waters. $50!?! The cheeseburger was not worth $25! A bit pricey for the food and it wasn't very tasty either... beware. Pay for the excursion that includes lunch and you may get a break on the food and it's less of a wait as well. They had a buffet set up for the groups that had lunch included so it was available immediately. In retrospect, we would have toured Grand Cayman on our own and just walked around the city. One more point to make about this stop. Grand Cayman doesn't have a dock so every ship has to take smaller boats back and forth from the cruise boat to the dock. When we were ready to head back to the boat, we saw a gigantic line of people waiting to get on the smaller boats and head back... as we were heading to the back of the line, very upset about having to wait, someone said, "Celebrity- go ahead of the line!" Celebrity had cold towels, juice, and water waiting for us on the dock, and they were running several boats back to our ship. The gigantic line was for Carnival! We were SO excited and relieved to not have to wait in that long long line! We will definitely be back on Celebrity!